Complaining about Windows Vista is a national past time on Internet forums these days. Windows Vista 'costs too much', 'has onerous product activation', 'requires too much hardware', etc. These complaints are often followed up by a very simple boast: 'I'm just going to switch to Linux'. But in today's landscape, how viable is that statment? Is the threat to switch to Linux an empty one, or is it entirely possible?"

Look at the positives. Hardocp is primarily a tech news, gaming and overclocking site whose natural territory is hardcore Windows stuff. The fact that they are happy to look at Linux at all is good news.

In addition, had this material been posted as a "review" on a different and more neutral website, folks would probably be saying how thorough it was compared to the usual Linux review which is often just a couple of pages of lightweight remarks about installing a distro. Hardocp really give Ubuntu a work over and they've also tried out a raft of applications and uses. In fact this is probably the most thorough review of Ubuntu I've read.

You may or may not like the hardocp team's conclusions but to me they are interesting because they suggest that the traditional Windows world is beginning to shift towards Linux.

That's because what the hardocp team end up suggesting is increasingly seen as quite normal rather than evidence of insanity or hardcore geekery. That is, dual boot using Windows for what you need to (gaming and specialist stuff like high-end Photoshopping) and using Linux for everything else because Linux is cheaper, much more flexible and a heck of a lot more secure.

Yes, this option is still only going to appeal to a limited number of people, but that is still many, many times the number of folks who were running Linux just a few years ago.